One would think that video games would be immune to ‘critic pump’ like many other mediums. For example I remember looking at reviews in the back of Rolling Stone back when I was in high school and I learned pretty quick that if the reviewer gave a music album five stars it was probably unlistenable bilge. Unfortunately video games are another art medium and as such are susceptible to the same faults. For example there’s one game that reviewers constantly chide gamers over not buying, but it’s a game that just doesn’t look very fun (though I confess to judging the book by it’s cover).

Another game that’s a sore spot for video game reviewers is Psychonauts. Developed by Tim Schafer, whose largest claim to fame is developing the original Monkey Island, the game shows promise but can never seem to escape the mediocre gameplay that glues the package together.

When I first started playing the game I ran into two technical faults that were somewhat beyond the foresight of the developers. The first is that the game runs too slowly to play under the PS3’s PS2 emulator. There’s some other games that do this, but oddly graphics power hogs like Final Fantasy XII and God of War II have no issues (maybe a reliance on some PS1 hardware functionality within the PS2? I kinda doubt it, but…). The other technical issue is that the artwork for the game was often too dark, and I mean too dark to see anything. A lot of games of that time didn’t come with a gamma correct, but many did (though the examples that come to mind are all from flat panel obsessed Japan). My hope at the time would be that the game would reward me for squinting at the screen while tethered to my PS2 via the controller cable.

It started out well enough. It was clear from the onset that the game had clever writing, memorable (if a bit generic) characters and a mildly unique art style. Once the gameplay started in earnest annoyances started to surface. Several of the ‘super powers’ had an intentional delay to keep them from being too ‘super’ and targeting enemies was iffy (a kind of hybrid auto-target that always seemed to target the wrong enemy). Later in the game when you’re sporting a bevy of super powers there’s no easy way to access them if you find the need to switch between them rapidly.

On top of that the inconsistent platforming and different-though-similar areas made the game start to feel more like a Spyro game that was put out for the original PlayStation*. The ever mounting number of collectibles seemed more like padding and busy work than actual game play elements (unlike Jak 3 which dared players to see if they had the mad skills to get the collectibles). The art and platforming elements also got old and I couldn’t escape the feeling that everything Tim Schafer was trying to do had been done better in the game Alice** (which looks better and was released five years before Psychonauts).

Another nagging fault included a health system that feels half play tested. You can carry health power ups but only three at a time, my first thought was that the damage dealt should have been modified so that there wasn’t one more piece of crap that you had to carry around. If you did happen to ‘die’ a certain number of times in a level you were kicked out of the level, and when you went back in you were…right back where you were when you were kicked out. What was that supposed to accomplish besides punishing players with the omnipresent extended load screen?

Towards the end of my playthrough I began to feel cheated. It’s one thing to waste two hours sitting through what’s supposed to be a great movie that’s actually a dud, but quite another to log 20+ hours into a very well reviewed, dog of game. Well that’s not fair, the game itself is OK, but nowhere near the quality of its hype. I must admit though that I got about 70% of the way through the game before deciding that it was a royal waste of my time and I was unable to force myself to play another minute of it***.

*Original 3D PlayStation games exhibited the same ‘wonky’, Tim Burton-esque art style though unintentionally due to the very limited capabilities of the hardware. I’d read somewhere that the PS1 didn’t actually support floating point math, which I find hard to believe, but I can’t find a corroborating source.

**American McGee’s Alice is an odd duck of game. I wanted to dislike it’s whacked out art for whacked out art’s sake, but the final weapon and the closing cut scene make the game worth sitting through.

***The whole experience reminded me of Grim Fandango, which happens to be another Tim Schafer game

This review of some rather ancient games will be a two-fer!

God of War II

Enchanted Arms

Movies have it easy. Someone can make a movie for $600,000 and bring in a quarter billion dollars worth of gravy. I remember an interview with one of the heads of the old Humongous Games company some ten years ago where he said that the bare minimum to bring a game to market that would be considered a higher tier product would be a million dollars (though even he seemed to concede that such a game would probably prove lacking). The newer downloadable game scene has opened doors for the makers of less expensive casual games*, but for those who want their game in a DVD case on a retailers shelf the expenses continue to mount.

For developers working on what is referred to as a ‘AAA’ title some of these cost concerns are mitigated due to publisher support. The original God of War shipped with a short ‘making of’ video that was unlocked upon beating the game. For God of War II the developers thought so much of their efforts that they put together a series of professional productions totaling around an hour worth of time on the second disk**. The game itself is impressive and as the developers note at the E3 showcase, it looked better on the PS2 than a lot of the first gen titles for the PS3. It’s a game that makes no bones about what it is: a showcase first party game with lots of over the top sets and violence that would only appeal to a male audience.

Just playing through the game I could see that almost no detail is left untuned and that the game must have been a massive development effort. The developer interviews detail late nights, constant tuning and a passion for quality artwork and presentation, in short, a single minded obsession to put out one of the best games of all time. Costs are of course a concern and the ‘making of’ details some dumped levels and concepts, but by and large Sony wanted what did make it into the game to be top flight, and they succeeded in their effort.

But what about studios without suckers for shareholders who are willing to take a bath on their stock to ‘sell a game that sells consoles’? What, if any corners can be cut? More importantly, is it possible to make a ‘B movie’ type of video game, a ‘B game’ as it were?

A little while ago I was looking around on Penny Arcade’s site looking for a Final Fantasy XII reference (what it was and why I was looking for it I cannot recall) but the top post in their system for my search was Gabe berating a critic for not liking a game called Enchanted Arms. Since I was in between games and had an RPG jonesin’, I picked it up (it’s pretty cheap used). When I started playing it I noticed right away that although some parts were strong, if a corner could be cut it was. Entire environments would be rendered with a handful of textures, villagers were all lifeless pallet swaps, and although Final Fantasy games occasionally feel overly directed, this game felt like it was on rails, especially for an RPG. Lastly (and ‘worstly’), instead of the lush, orchestrated God of War II soundtrack that was recorded in three different countries, Enchanted Arms featured the single worst soundtrack of any game I’ve played since the Atari 2600. It has a small handful of OK songs, that you will hear repeatedly, and many more horrible tunes that were no doubt produced by someone on the dev team whose only musical experience was recorder lessons in second grade (needless to say I ended up muting the game for long stretches).

For all it’s faults though the game seems to work. Instead of a bevy of unfocused characters the tight roster fleshes out the players more roundly*** than many other RPGs. Since the game expects you to go from point A to point B and not wander around, there’s a bare minimum of grinding. Lastly, since the developers knew that they weren’t bringing much to the game, they made sure the battle system and story were pretty good.

So yes it’s possible to make a ‘B game’ but it’s difficult since it’s a short path from there to unplayable Wii style shovelware; video games just aren’t very tolerant to a lot of cutbacks. If Enchanted Arms cut out dialog or story, or cheaped out on the battle system the game would have gone from okay to horrible (as opposed to God of War II which probably could have cut 10% of the corners and no one would have noticed). What I thought was interesting was that Tycho at Penny Arcade thought it was possible as well and as a reference he pointed out a game made by From Software, which just so happened to make Enchanted Arms as well. So I doubt that any From Software games will feature a ‘making of’ feature like the one that shipped with God of War II; if it did I would envision profiles of developers who left work early to play pachinko and artists who just carried over half the assets from some PlayStation 2 game that they made five years earlier.

*Jonathan Blow, well known developer of the game Braid notes that making a casual game can be free so long as you don’t mind living in your mom’s basement for three years.

**It shows what a gaming nerd I am that I enjoyed the ‘making of’ features nearly as much as the game itself.

***I need to point out that this game also had the most flagrantly gay characters of any game probably ever. It’s one thing to be a flaming homo, it’s quite another for the character to spend most of his on-screen time sexually harassing (sometimes physically!) one of the other male characters. Such things are such the joke JapanLand.

It’s beyond debate that artists create art for video games, but to what extent does the total video game package count as art? It’s a debate that may never end as a video game doesn’t have much in common with ‘closed loop’ style art like movies, where the art of the package is all that is brought to the table. In contrast video games have more in common with something along the lines of a house.

If someone sees a Frank Loyd Wright house with custom furniture and handmade wood working they would say “ART!”, but if people saw a cookie cutter suburban house decked out with the cheapest fixtures that China can produce “ART!” would not spring to mind, ever. In between the two extremes are a variety of contructs that may be art in some ways, but not in others. Carrying this analogy even further, both a house and a video game can suffer from ‘too much art’. A house can be too ‘Frank Gehry’ and leak all the time and game can be all ‘art’ and no ‘game’ with the same amount of interaction as a DVD remote.

What brought this to the top of my mind was Steve Sailer’s post on how unappreciated video game art is in the same vein as his interest in unappreciated golf course design art. Now how much golf course design is just exterior design writ large is open to debate, but I think that it’s also fair to think that golf course design would have an influence on exterior design of any scale.

However, wouldn’t a better gauge of art be its influences outside of its medium? This is something that golf courses can’t really do (though the case may be made for exterior design in general). With video games on the other hand I have seen its influences primarily in movies. There’s the probable influence the game God of War had on the movie 300, the slicked over, non-stop action of the latest Star Trek film which almost felt like I could play along with, and James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar, which, like the last Riddick film, was made along with the video game (a movie/game which itself seems to borrow from yet a different game).

But when will video games be appreciated as art? I tend to think that this is a generational thing and that in fifty years or so the answer to the question will be so obvious that it won’t even brought up.